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“... The first of the great Indian novelists to write in English, R.K. Narayan, wrote modest novels about modest people living in the small South Indian town of Malgudi. The completeness of the world he creates is possible only because that world is so circumscribed. Then in 1981 Salman Rushdie published Midnight’s Children, and such a narrow focus no longer seemed possible ...”

“... in The Spirit of the Age.)In​ Byron’s ‘Don Juan’: The Liberal Epic of the 19th Century, Richard Cronin sees the same parallels and collisions in Byron’s last poem. ‘There is a public world in Don Juan, a world of facts, a world of pumps and barbettes and periwigs, and a private world of feeling,’ he argues. ‘One is forever being ...”

“... to embark on another round. In their introduction to Emma in the Cambridge edition of the novels, Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan argue that Austen wrote for the rereader. In Emma she deliberately sacrificed ‘readability’ for the sake of a novel that ‘demanded repeated rereadings’. Wiltshire cites their argument that Emma, more than any other ...”

“... to show what it was like to be a Jew in Germany during the first 45 years of this century. Dr Richard Lasson, the narrator, traces his own career from front-line service in the First World War, through the mounting uncertainties and perils of the Twenties and Thirties to desperately precarious survival in Berlin during the Second World War. Walter Laqueur ...”

“... Romanticism​ bequeathed a good many things to the beleaguered modern imagination, one of the most provoking of which was the thought that it should get out more. That bit of advice proved all the more challenging because it contradicted the other basic idea which the Romantics left behind – namely, that what mattered was staying inside, wrapped in the private world of subjectivity and ‘mental space ...”

“... introduced the 1939 screen version of The Stars Look Down – the words are possibly those of A.J. Cronin, the novelist, rather than of Carol Reed, the film’s director – signalled a remarkable turn-around in attitudes to the miners, as well as prefiguring what was to be the leading idiom of British wartime cinema. The success of the film itself (fear of ...”

“... so perhaps this was the kind of secret that people in Dublin were happy to know. After I read Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce in my twenties, I asked my mother about Eileen. She knew quite a lot about her mother’s friend. The Joyce family had lived locally for some years. Eileen had a flat in Mountjoy Square, where she stayed during the week, and ...”

“... of the magazine, then only recently transformed by its odd and near invisible editor Hubert de Cronin Hastings, Betjeman’s jocular, impressionable soul was temporarily stolen by the hard men of the Modern Movement. Then, after Betjeman resigned, along came Pevsner, to hammer home the determinist message with which the magazine was obsessed. Or that is ...”

“... as clever Victor Gollancz spotted when he picked her out for his list as a successor to A.J. Cronin. Having said that, one hears the sad voice of E.M. Forster: ‘Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story.’ He calls the story ‘a low atavistic form’ and envisages an audience of cave-persons ‘gaping round the camp-fire, fatigued with ...”

“... undertones’). Prematurely aged and alcoholic – according to his friend and biographer Anthony Cronin, by his late forties O’Nolan was generally so pickled by three in the afternoon that he retired to bed – he was never not in the position of having to carve out a place for himself as a writer. The failure to find an American publisher for At ...”

“... Jack Yeats and some poems, a few of them masterpieces of their kind, he wrote books on Eliot and Richard Aldington for the same series as Beckett’s book on Proust, the publication of which he arranged. He later wrote a monograph on Poussin and was director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963. McGreevy flits in and out of the lives of ...”